On Tuesday afternoon i went in college to do my portfolio presentation. I feel that it went quite well, especially considering that i have anxiety when public speaking. I did have a bit of a hiccup half way through, where i forgot what to say, but continued anyway. I think they liked my VFX project (where my dog Phoebe disappears through a fire portal), as i heard a chuckle or two.

Afterwards i was sent out of class for a minute while the lecturers deliberated. When i was brought back in, they told me that they didn’t know whether to give me a pass or a merit. In the end they decided on a merit, but i have lots to improve on and they gave me lots of constructive criticism. Since i like art, and it is the subject i will specialise in next year, they felt that i didn’t put enough of my artwork in the presentation. A lot of the art I’ve done are just sketches, so i was hesitant to include them. They also said that to get a distinction i should work to make everything the best quality it can be.

In class everyone got the opportunity to try out games in VR. There were two platforms, i don’t remember what the other one was but the one that i had a go of was the PlayStation VR. The headset for the other one wouldn’t fit over my glasses, but the PlayStation one did, and i could adjust the focus on it.

Once i was in, there were a number of different games that i could play. The one that i chose, and a number of other students did too, was a game called Valkyrie. It was a futuristic space game where you are controlling a spaceship and have to navigate and shoot enemy ships. The whole experience was quite strange – it was weird being able to look around by turning your head – but it was very cool.

In our lesson with Chris, we learned more about Adobe Animate/Flash. We started off with some basic shapes. We did small changes like the style of line and colour, but then made more drastic adjustments – like changing the shape completely.

There are two types of shape tool in Flash – normal and primitive – and you can use one to cut holes in the other.

Using this new knowledge, we were then given the task of creating a self portrait in Flash. It was quite tricky to get to grips with, but after a while i got the hang of it, and separating things out onto different layers proved to be very helpful.

On the 23rd September we all went to EGX in Birmingham. It was a long trip there – around 4 hours – but it was worth it for the experience.

Youtubers such as Syndicate and the Yogscast were there, and there were huge ques to go and meet them.

Instead of waiting in big ques to try out well known games, i went to the indie game section, where there was an array of new/unreleased games for people to play. Sacramento was one of the games I tried, it didn’t really have a plot of sorts or any objective, it was just really artsy and had pretty calming music. Another artsy game I tried was called A Skyrocket Story. This one had an interesting plot and I really liked it, it wasn’t challenging since really the only thing I had to do was follow the light to keep the story going.

There were lots of stalls to buy stuff from, merchandise from loads of different games. I found it funny that there was a dank meme stall.

Today in class with Matt, we had to do a 3 minute presentation, which we had started researching last week. The presentation had to be on a company – game, film, etc – and we had to explain why we chose them and how they inspire us.

My PowerPoint was all about Studio Ghibli and Disney. The animated characters that these companies make inspire me, and I love the different art styles that they do.